Proximity Doesn’t Benefit Just Big Cities, It’s Helping Rural Communities Weather the Economic Crisis Too

More than six months into the COVID-19 pandemic, America’s small businesses are in a prolonged struggle for survival. And like many aspects of the pandemic, this struggle is wrought with geographic disparities. The severity of the small business crisis varies by state, city, town, and even neighborhood, with businesses in areas dependent on leisure and hospitality at an especially heightened risk. Rural communities have been hit particularly hard, as many had staked their economic revival on fostering locally owned small businesses and recreation-based downtowns. The threat to rural America is compounded by relief structures that have largely lagged to reach small businesses in the hardest-hit places. Given this uneven geography of recovery, the National Main Street Center (NMSC) and Brookings’s Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking wanted to take a more granular look at how place impacts small business survival. Follow this link to read more.

Sourced from: Brookins

Decision-Making Tree for Prioritizing Racial Equity in Resource Allocation

As Extension seeks to respond to the challenges of the 21st century, staff from University of Minnesota Extension’s health and nutrition program area are embracing racial equity as a core focus of their systems change work. They believe that racial equity is an integral part of work across Extension services and that we must improve our capacity to serve Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) community members. Consider, for example, how health and nutrition are connected to disparities in food access, agriculture is connected to disparities in land access, and access to youth programming is connected to disparities in graduation rates in BIPOC communities as compared to predominantly White communities (Hassel, 2004; Horst & Marion, 2018; Raja et al., 2008; Ratkos & Knollenberg, 2015). In Minnesota, this is especially significant, given the state’s ranking as one of the worst in the nation in terms of racial inequality (McCann, 2020).
Follow this link to read more.

Sourced from: Journal of Extension

Jamie Bain
Health and Nutrition Extension Educator

Noelle Harden
Health and Nutrition Extension Educator

Stephanie Heim
Associate Program Director

Center for Family Development
University of Minnesota Extension

 

World Cities Day 2020

World Cities Day 2020 is the seventh global celebration since the day was launched on October 31, 2014 in Shanghai, China. Under overarching theme of Better City, Better Life, the aim of the day is to focus the international community’s attention on urbanization as a central issue for development and to encourage cooperation among countries in meeting opportunities and addressing urban challenges toward sustainable development.

Each year a different sub-theme is selected, to either promote successes of urbanization, or address specific challenges resulting from urbanization. The sub-theme for this year is Valuing our communities and cities, and the Global Observance will be hosted in Nakuru, Kenya.

World Cities Day seeks to promote global interest in urbanization and engender international cooperation to address the challenges of urbanization, thereby contributing to sustainable urban development. Follow this link to learn more.

Sourced from: UN-Habitat

Leading Edge Dialog Series: Urban Green Infrastructure Workshop

Every Leading Edge Dialogue (LED) held at the 2019 National Urban Extension explored innovative shifts in Extension’s vision of its future and its role in the communities it serves. While this workshop was not an official LED, the discussions that took place regarding Extension’s role (or future) in urban green infrastructure (UGI) as a programming area is a practical example of many of the points raised in the LEDs held during the conference. Follow this link to read the paper.

Sourced from: Western Center for Metropolitan Extension and Research

Microsoft Teams Training

Join members of the OSU Extension Learning and Organizational Development Unit (LOD), on Thursday, November 5 at 2 p.m. for a Microsoft Teams Training. In this training they will review some basic skills and helpful tips in MS Teams. This 60-minute training will be recorded and posted to LOD website for future reference. Follow this link to register.

Sourced from: Learning and Organizational Development

10th Annual Ohio Food Policy Summit + Ohio Local Food Council Workshop

Join the Ohio Food Policy Network (OFPN) and the John Glenn College of Public Affairs for the 10th Annual Ohio Food Policy Summit and Ohio Local Food Council Workshop, which is being held virtually this November. 

Ohio Food Policy Summit
Monday, November 16, 1-4 p.m. E.T.

• Keynote speaker Tom Philpott, author of Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It
• Presentation of the OFPN draft policy framework and the opportunity to interact with the framework, setting the course of the OFPN policy agenda
• Presentation of the OFPN Food Hero award

Ohio Local Food Council Workshop
Tuesday, November 17, 4-6 p.m. E.T.

• This interactive workshop will prepare local food policy councils to operationalize their policy agendas
• Topics addressed include how to work within the law, steps in campaign building and tools to move forward

Follow this link to register.
Follow this link to join the Ohio Food Policy Network

 

Sourced from OFPN

What Does Equity in Smart Growth Really Mean?

Join the Smart Growth Network at 2:30 p.m. Friday, October 23, as Calvin Gladney, President and CEO of Smart Growth America and a national thought leader on equitable and sustainable community revitalization, and Andre Perry of the Brookings Institution and author of Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities meet in a virtual forum to discuss smart growth’s past, present, and future. Gladney and Perry will examine the current state of built environments and the policies that have historically affected the lives of people of color and look to the future to explore the potential for positive change. Follow this link to learn more.

Sourced from: Smart Growth Online

Ohio State Digital Accessibility Skills Training Curricula

Learn to develop accessible digital products through Digital Accessibility Skills Training now available in BuckeyeLearn. Courses include accessibility training for documents, PDFs, presentations, websites, and more. Enhance your accessibility expertise and take a course today. Follow this link to learn more.

Sourced from: IT @ OSU